"The Karate Kid" meets "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" in "The Forbidden Kingdom."

This martial arts extravaganza has plenty of kung fu energy but a story and dialogue that don't always hold together.

Director Rob Minkoff aspires to the visual splendors of "Crouching Tiger" and "Curse of the Golden Flower" but he doesn't achieve the former's elegant lyricism or the latter's Shakespearean underpinnings.

Instead, he delivers a reasonably entertaining movie aimed at the box office and not at the art house. In the process he brings together the two most popular martial arts movie stars working today. Jackie Chan brings his over-the-top but likable buffoonery to the yarn and the lethal Jet Li is on hand to lend a little gravitas.

Michael Anganaro plays Jason, a wimpy teen living in South Boston. Jason is an obsessive martial arts movie fan who lives in a fantasy world through the DVDs he buys from his friendly pawn broker. When Jason runs afoul of some street thugs, he's forced to break into his friend's pawn shop. There he finds a golden staff and is soon whisked away to an ancient Chinese wonderland in order to restore the weapon to its rightful owner.

There, he's befriended by Lu Yan, a drunken poet played by Chan. Lu Yan insists that Jason deliver the staff to the impish Monkey King who has been imprisoned in stone by an evil warlord (Colin Chou). Once the Monkey King is liberated, the Jade Kingdom can be restored to a state of benevolence.

On the journey, the two travelers pick up a warrior monk played by Jet Li and a pretty musician played by Crystal Liu. If this foursome's trip to the Five Elements Mountain smacks of "The Wizard of Oz" it's no accident. A wicked witch who wants the staff shows up and in the end Jason just wants to go home.

In the meantime, Jason's comrades are disgusted by the fact that he has no kung fu and they set out to remedy the situation by becoming his martial arts masters. These are some of the movie's funniest moments. Sprinkled among the movie's imitative attempts at mystical and mythic scope and its kung fu coming of age saga are plenty of snippets of suspect Zen philosophy. But members of the movie's target audience aren't likely to care about the dramatic and artistic shortcomings. They'll show up for the soaring fight scenes and there are plenty of them. Chan and Li get to mix it up once and they deliver a doozy of a smack down.

The performances are adequate to the job. Anganaro is an appealing nerd who grows into a warrior. Li takes on two roles -- the monk and the Monkey King. As the king, he gets to bring a little ham to the table.